Equipping the Project

[cosmicfish]

There are a lot of posts on here suggesting various vehicles that Teams could use, ranging from one-off prototypes to limited production vehicles to widely-fielded vehicles, and there seem to be realistic problems with all of these. So I wanted to ask some questions of the forum:

What percentage of equipment (especially weapons and vehicles) are obtained by:

1) Building them from scratch (like the MARS-One and Science-One vehicles)

2) Buying surplus

3) Buying commercial and modifying to "military" standards

4) Buying the production lines and running off extra

Each method has problems:

1) A lot of engineering and lots of hard-to-conceal manufacturing

2 and 4) Most of the good stuff is watched pretty closely and might be hard to move

3) For most of the vehicles needed, this would be extremely difficult.

The Project suffers from the problems of every large organization, a large variety of vehicles provides a diverse set of specialized tools that can handle a large range of problems, but logistically it is better to have few vehicles that can individually decently handle a lot of problems.

So how is this balanced in your games?

If we assume that the Project has 10,000 people (my low-end estimate of project strength), and that you need about 1 vehicle for every 8 people (accounting both for the fact that some teams have 2-3 vehicles and that a base of 50 might only have 2 vehicles) then that is still 1250 armored, fusion-powered vehicles that need to be acquired. If the Project has 50,000 people (my high-end estimate) then the same math gives us 6250 such vehicles.

Any way you look at it, this is a lot of vehicles.